Afro-American Studies Dissertations CollectionCopyright (c) 2017 University of Massachusetts Amherst All rights reserved.http://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_diss
Recent documents in Afro-American Studies Dissertations Collectionen-usFri, 02 Jun 2017 12:20:22 PDT3600Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedyhttp://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/886
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/886Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:50:22 PDT
When Kegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch-comedy show Key & Peele took Comedy Central by storm in 2012, the perceived need by the comedians to “adjust their blackness” to gain social recognition became a recurring theme. Throughout their comedic performances, language becomes a proxy for identity, and Key and Peele’s parodic employment of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and linguistic variation serves to challenge notions of black authenticity, while emphasizing the absurdity of racial essentialism.

An embodiment of Jonathan Rossing’s concept of emancipatory racial humor, Key and Peele’s comedy creates nonthreatening spaces that facilitate the contestation of cultural authority by interrogating how social categories are constructed via linguistic practices, revealing the interconnectedness among the ontology of the black body, epistemic authority, and linguistic authenticity.

This dissertation examines the adoption of identity tropes by Key and Peele through their use of AAVE in relation to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy and the poet’s struggle to represent black subjectivity and folk culture without lapsing into minstrelsy. Particular attention is paid to how Dunbar responded to the political dynamic of subordination and resistance that defined linguistic conflict at the end of the nineteenth century and the inability of his critics to recognize the subversive and resistive nature of much of his work.

Exploring the dialect comedy of Dunbar alongside Key and Peele in the context of controversies surrounding linguistic minstrelsy in mediatized performances of AAVE from Amos ‘n’ Andy to The Boondocks, I conclude that far from lapsing into minstrelsy, Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy catalyzed resistive ideologies, resulting in the emergence of a new black modernism. Like Key and Peele, Dunbar engages in meta-parody by placing himself in the performance, deliberately showcasing the richness and complexity of AAVE as a medium for conveying social commentary in which the audience comes to appreciate the intellect of the person telling the joke. The knowing and strategic inauthenticity in their performances invites audience interpretation of a deeper message, positioning Dunbar, along with Key and Peele, as tricksters who employ sophisticated vernacular masking to contest racial stereotypes, even as they enact them.

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Kuchle, Spencer"Daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising in the Poetry and Drama of the Black Power Era, 1965-1976http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/738
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/738Thu, 10 Nov 2016 07:49:40 PST
This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and dramatists of African descent writing in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Many artists I examine—including, yet not limited to, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Ed Bullins—were affiliated with the well-known Black Arts Movement, which focused on a revolutionary, black-centered commentary on American society through the arts with a goal of black liberation and veneration of an African past, the African-American present, the restoration of black masculinity, and the future of the people as a nation. However, other artists of this period, including black female poets Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara and, later, playwright Ntozake Shange, presented further discussions of the intersections of identity and consciousness not only as black women but as members of the gay/lesbian and feminist struggles for equal rights in America, issues which add a layer of reflection to the calls of Black Arts arbiters for critical consciousness and demands a more complicated and multifaceted examination of what it means to be human and liberated as a black person in America.
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Davis, Markeysha D.Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, and Diasporic Versification in the United States Before the New Negrohttp://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/542
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/542Mon, 09 Nov 2015 12:32:19 PST
This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through common condition, culture, or politics – present within black literary thought, and thus within black communities, long before the New Negro. By extension, I advocate for a reimagining of the significance of nineteenth and eighteenth century poets within African American literature.

The dissertation challenges the accusation that black poetry in the United States was wholly assimilative or parroting, instead positing the strategic mimicry of neoclassicism and romanticism as subversive and in direct conversation (and contention) with racist Enlightenment discourses. The dissertation considers a range of poets of varying repute: George Moses Horton, Phillis Wheatley, James Madison Bell, Joshua McCarter Simpson, George Boyer Vashon, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Monroe Whitfield, T. Thomas Fortune, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, George Clinton Rowe, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poets considered challenge traditional notions of patriotism and allegiance by championing rights for those of like ancestry within and across national boundaries. In turn, the study is indicative of how a patriotic nationalism can coexist with a Pan-African sensibility through a sustained critique of (global) white hegemony.

The study explores how these poets evince their race patriotism through a variety of means, including Ethiopianism, salvation-liberation ideology, and usage of tribute poems to honor figures, events, and places within the diaspora (e.g. Haiti, Jamaican Emancipation, Joseph Cinqué, Vincent Ogé). Through their content, I argue that the poets engage in a project of historical reclamation and history building that demonstrates their awareness of their distinct identities within and beyond the nation-state.

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Hendrickson, Jason T.Sweat the Technique: Visible-izing Praxis Through Mimicry in Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/484
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/484Mon, 09 Nov 2015 11:47:14 PST
“On Being Brought from Africa to America” was written in 1768, seven years after a

seven or eight-year-old Phillis Wheatley arrived to British North America. Phillis

Wheatley was about fifteen-years-old when she wrote the most reviled poem in

from Africa to America” would condemn Phillis Wheatley as an imitator of the white

gaze. Although accused of straightening her tongue, Phillis Wheatley did not imitate

the white gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” She mimicked it. To

imitate means to do something the same way. To mimic means to resemble.

Resemblance lives in the liminal space between sameness and difference. This

study sought to investigate what that in-between space of resemblance afforded

Wheatley in terms of movement and self-actualization as an enslaved Black poet. As

an inaugural text in dissemblance, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

showcased how mimicry, not imitation, could be used to undo the very Anglo-

European literary practices and discourses that sought to keep Black writers at bay.

This dissertation seeks to investigate how Phillis Wheatley used mimicry in “On

Being Brought from Africa to America” as a subversive vehicle to say without saying.

Using resemblance to hide difference, Wheatley, through mimicry, turned a sign of

conquest and domination (English as representative of European imperialism) into a

sign of resistance.

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Zelaya, Karla V."The Imagination and Construction of the Black Criminal in American Literature, 1741-1910"http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/422
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/422Mon, 09 Nov 2015 09:25:52 PST
My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, and literary works, I demonstrate how historical and cultural representations of crime became racialized.

I begin by analyzing the New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 and reading the legal testimonies produced by the event as literature. These testimonies contributed to the production of late eighteenth-century confessional narratives, in which there was a disproportionate representation of those from African descent. From here, I examine different institutions of confinement and mechanisms of torture used on enslaved and free black people, arguing that what emerges from their brutalization and confinement is the circulation of ideas about black people as subjects having a propensity for transgressive behavior. After investigating literary works by William Wells Brown and Mark Twain, among others, I conclude with an analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois’s unpublished short stories. Written in the genres of crime and detective fiction during the first decade of the twentieth century, I argue that these little-known stories use, yet subvert ideas about criminality as inherent among black people and can be read against his sociological studies on urban crime in the same period.

By focusing on literature and culture as ways of understanding perceptions and constructions of racial groups, my dissertation intervenes in legal studies scholarship and scholarship on the history of crime in America. More broadly, it builds upon the larger field of African American Studies by challenging the binary of agency and oppression through examining literary representations of contentious relationships between slaveholders and the enslaved. Through various literatures of the colonial, early national, antebellum, and post-Reconstruction periods, what is at stake in my project is how the criminalization of black people predates Reconstruction and convict leasing. In its attempts to reveal connections between criminality, race, and the judicial system in our contemporary moment, my work is especially timely in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others.

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Campbell, EmahunnCreating the Ideal Mexican: 20th and 21st Century Racial and National Identity Discourses in Oaxacahttp://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/420
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/420Mon, 09 Nov 2015 09:25:47 PST
This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities and incorporate sectors of the population into the national framework that had been excluded prior to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. While these efforts were predominantly implemented in indigenous communities located in the northern part of Oaxaca, observations from cultural missionaries related to social and educational conditions reveal ongoing disparities between what it means to be indigenous versus mestizo. The exclusion of moreno, or Afro-descended people from this state sponsored initiative indicates that blackness along with indigenity is otherized, with the primary difference being that Afro-descended Mexicans lack visibility.

To gain a better perspective of the historical and present significance of blackness, my project moves from the general to the specific to include José Maria Morelos, Oaxaca, an Afro-descendedcommunity that is isolated, has no tourist attractions or services, dirt roads, and little access to socioeconomic resources. Morelos was established by blacks who escaped slavery and lived independently in their own community. People in the town strongly identify with this history and its relation to their present condition. After speaking with local activists, it became apparent that rights that were supposed to be gained from the Mexican Revolution, such as land rights and public education, did not happen in Morelos, which adversely affects people’s prospects for socioeconomic advancement.

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Carroll, Savannah N.The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900-1930http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/360
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/360Thu, 20 Aug 2015 06:44:22 PDT
My dissertation, “The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900—1930,” situates the early twentieth century of African American physical culture within a historical narrative that shaped philosophical viewpoints of African American urban community development. Previous inquiries of related topics attempt to describe a physical culture movement that was somehow separate and apart from the larger historical narrative of African people in the United States. My work does not continue in that vein. My objective is to illustrate how the black physical culture movement was primarily a reaction to African Americans’ new geo-political realities and communal aspirations as they began to establish communities outside of the rural South.

In part one of my dissertation I interrogate the relationship between the African-American physical culture movement and black social scientists’ investigations social issues that plagued the increasingly urbanizing black population at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that black social reformers adopted aspects of the physical culture movement to remedy issues related to poor health, inadequate childcare, inadequate education, and youthful mischief. I conclude this section by arguing that, despite their early achievements in spreading movement aims, on the eve of Depression era, black physical culture proponents began to compete with the spoils of their own success. This last point has great implications for modern African American student-athletes and the communities who support them.

In part two I analyze the black playground movement as a manifestation of “race adjustment” as depicted within the pages of Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper. My first argument is that from 1909 to 1925, the Afro-American, which began as one of the most important black periodicals, became increasingly disillusioned with the idea of reaching an accommodation with the larger white population. This is evidenced by its evolving definition of the term race adjustment and the newspaper’s subsequent advocacy for race progress. My second argument is that the Afro, which had been known as an overtly political instrument for black self-determination, adopted as one of its principal campaigns the construction of playgrounds for reasons related to race advancement. I conclude by arguing that the struggle to erect playgrounds in black Baltimore unfolded in ways that differed greatly from the effort to establish playgrounds for white and European immigrant youth. My epilogue outlines some areas for future research.

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Guillory, J. AnthonyThe (Dis)Ability of Color; or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding of 19th and 20th Century Passing Narrativeshttp://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/351
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/351Thu, 20 Aug 2015 06:39:55 PDT
This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the failure of America to acknowledge its wrongdoings against people of color. While this project surveys passing narratives collectively, it pays careful consideration to those novelists whose presentations of the mixed-race figure challenge previously conceived notions of the “tragic mulatto” figure. I investigate how the writers each illuminate elements of the history of slavery and its aftermath in order to remark on black disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, I argue for the importance of the mixed-race figure as a potent symbol for imagined resolution between the larger narrative of American freedom and enslavement of blacks in the United States.

I examine several works of African American racial passing literature: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. It explores the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), tells the true story of the mixed-race Ellen Craft and her husband who escaped to freedom through various racial performances. Nella Larsen sets her novella Passing (1929) in Harlem in the 1920s. The story centers on two childhood friends reunited, but each dealing with their mixed-race ancestry in different ways. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “A Matter of Principle” (1900). endeavors to depict a better class of blacks through her examination of the fair-skinned bourgeois-striver Angela Murray. Each of these stories address American legacies of racism and representation beginning with the Civil War.

I investigate how these authors use the mixed-race figure (mostly) following the Civil War to mark the continuing impact that its legacy has had on black Americans through the New Negro Harlem Renaissance, but also to gesture to the mythic moment of freedom symbolized by successfully crossing the so-called color line. In addition to cataloguing an era of migration, the African American passing narrative represents the moment in which we shift from only seeing characters in terms of monoracial identities. These writers suggest that new performative modes of racial affiliation are necessary to achieve freedom. Reminding us that characters of mixed status practiced race in ways that enabled them to build shared identity despite an often disparate cultural heritage, these works suggest that identities like blackness are always constituted through performance. I argue that racial passing facilitated the “performance” of whiteness together with, an acknowledgment of what is accepted as blackness.

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Charles, Julia S.Imaging Her Selves: Black Women Artists, Resistance, Image and Representation, 1938-1956http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/350
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/350Thu, 20 Aug 2015 06:34:53 PDT
This dissertation focuses specifically on dancer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), pianist Hazel Scott (1920-1981), cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911-1985), singer Lena Horne (1917-2010), and graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). It explores the artistic, performative, and political resistance deployed by these five African-American women activists, artists, and performers in the period between 1937 and 1957. The principal form of resistance employed by these women was cultural resistance. Using a mixture of archival research, first person interview, biography, as well as other primary and secondary sources, I explore how these women constructed personas, representations, and media images of African-American women to challenge the racialized, reductive constructions found in mainstream white media and fine art outlets. They simultaneously engaged in “off the page” and “off the stage” political activism during eras that were pivotal within the African-American fight for freedom and equality. The primary purpose of the dissertation then is to unveil this multi-terrain struggle over Black female agency, equality, image, and representation waged by highly visible African-American artists and performers positioned in popular culture and fine art during this period. I argue that this battle is a fundamental component and sits within the larger long struggle for African-American freedom and equality.
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Caldwell, Heather ZahraBetween the black diaspora of enslavement and the Nigerian diaspora since the demise of colonialism : an assessment of the consequences of two historic migrations to the United States/http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/933
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/933Thu, 19 Mar 2015 11:03:17 PDTUdofia, Paul E.